


You Can Leave Your Mask On

by irrelevant



Category: Batgirl (Comic), DCU, DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Gen, Humor, Snark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-11
Updated: 2010-12-11
Packaged: 2017-10-13 15:19:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/138768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irrelevant/pseuds/irrelevant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Ssshh.  I'm having a moment."</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Can Leave Your Mask On

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the way so many superheroes seem to sit around in diners and cafes talking blithely about their ‘other’ lives without a thought for who might be listening.

Elephant’s Child is packed the way it usually is in the evening, and Steph is grinning at the crowd as she steps through the door. Places like this one give her a tiny kick of belonging she’s not used to; it always surprises her a little how much she likes that.

She likes the smells of hot fries, overheating laptops and cooling coffee. Loves the sound of smart minds and mouths rubbing each other the wrong way, sparking new ideas off old arguments and stubborn brain cells.

Being here makes her feel like she’s the real deal: a real girl with a real goal finally making her life happen instead of letting it happen to her. Elephant’s Child is a college hangout and when she’s sitting at one of its worn tables she’s just another college student, albeit one with an extreme hobby.

At least that’s usually how it goes. She shows up, sees a familiar face, gets sucked into the crowd and enjoys some pretend normal until Proxy pushes her buzzer. Tonight’s a little different, though, and if she forgets, all she has to do is turn around and look at what’s following her.

Heck, she doesn’t even need to look to feel the glare boring into the back of her head; the kid’s hairy eyeball is on par with his dad’s. Maybe even better than the old man’s; the current itch between her shoulder blades is about a zillion times more annoying than any creeped-out feeling the Bat ever gave her.

The urge to stop walking and let him bang his nose on her backpack is almost irresistible.

Almost. Close, but no freaking banana. She’s the adult, here, and she’s going to act like one if it kills her. Maybe if she tells herself that a few hundred more times, she’ll start to believe it.

And speaking of telling herself, _Save it for the bad guys, Brown, the kid’s not worth the trouble_. She keeps her face forward and keeps moving, shouldering her way through the clogged mass of her fellow students and waving to Morgan at the register as she does.

Morgan waves back and points to the back of the room. Steph gives her a thumbs-up and says out of the corner of her mouth, “Stick close. We’ve got a table if you don’t get stepped-on on the way over.”

“Unlikely. You’re making a hole big enough for two of me to walk through,” Damian says from behind her. “Was it necessary to come here? This establishment smells of road kill.”

“Way to detonate the mood, boy psycho,” she mutters. _Walking. I am walking._

“Steph!” The cute guy who usually sits next to her in environmental bio is currently sitting on the outside of a packed booth. He leans toward her, smiling at her while she tries to remember his name.

Allen. Ashton. Andy... no. “Adam, hey,” she says, pausing beside him. Unfortunately Damian avoids running into her; the irritation level in his “Tt” tells her she’d better not stop for long.

“Hey,” says Adam. “We missed you in class yesterday.”

Probably because she was playing rooftop hide and seek with a drug-dealing scumbag, she doesn’t say. “Flu,” she tells him instead. “One of those twenty-four hours things.” He grimaces his sympathy before letting his smile creep back.

On a normal night she might take the invitation implicit in that smile and join him, but tonight she just grins ruefully and jerks her thumb over her shoulder.

His gaze drifts briefly to Damian before focusing on her. His smile widens into an answering grin, “Rain check?”

“Stop encouraging lustful idiots and move,” Damian grumbles.

Steph rolls her eyes. She gives Adam the smile that used to make Tim look like he’d just been smacked hard on the head, as well as a noncommittal shrug, and dives for her empty table, claiming it before two guys in letter jackets can.

“Sorry,” she tells them while Damian scowls at them around her shoulder, “I think there are a couple of free spaces at the third booth back that way.”

They leave, returning Damian’s dirty look in passing, and Steph pulls out the chair closest to her. “I don’t know why you’re in such a hurry,” she says as she slides into it. “Unless you’re suddenly in the mood for road kill?”

Damian drops his backpack beside the other chair and sits down, crossing his arms. “The sooner you feed your starving fat cells, the sooner I can leave.”

Setting her own backpack between her feet, she pulls two menus out of the holder, drops one in front of him and opens the other. “Look, we’re tired and hungry—”

“Tt.”

“Okay, _I’m_ tired and hungry. You’re a pain in the ass.” She tosses her menu to the side – she doesn’t know why she even bothered with one, she always gets the same thing – and gives him his glare back. “You know, you didn’t have to come with. We're inactive until eleven. Why didn’t you just go home first?”

He looks sharply away. “Drake is there with his… friends.”

Ah. “What about the manor? It’s not like he’d kick you out. You’re his kid.”

His shrug is sullen. His profile reminds her of Tim’s when he’s being a major pain.

Not that she’ll ever say that out loud. With her luck, the little creep would have a screaming tantrum right here.

Still, she can kind of see where he’s coming from. Not too long ago she was the black sheep, always on the fringes of their weird little club until Damian came along and bumped her a notch up the totem pole.

Now—now she’s got Babs and Wendy, and her mom, in a different kind of way. Even Cass sometimes, when she stays in one place long enough to call or be called.

Who does Damian have, really? Sure, Dick and Alfred care, but in a tight corner, Bruce and/or Tim are still going to be their priority. Damian’s not old enough to understand or know how to deal with the exclusive _thing_ Bruce and Dick and Tim have got going on.

It took her forever to learn, or at least it felt that way. She’s always had guts, but she had to grow some serious nerve to stand up to Bruce and tell him exactly where he could shove his British boarding school. He doesn’t control Batgirl _or_ Stephanie Brown, and the next time he tries – because he so will – screw smacking him in the face with his own arrogance.

She’ll just sucker punch him. It’s what he’d do to her if she gave him an opening, and damned if she ever will again. She’s a slow learner, maybe, but when she does learn something it stays learned, and Bruce’s free pass expired a long time ago.

She’s glad he’s not dead. That doesn’t mean she’ll let him walk all over her again.

Damian’s not her, though. He’s just a kid. A dangerous, homicidal kid who’s not even halfway to eleven. Worse, he’s _his_ kid, and god, even her dad—

Okay, so, maybe not. But seriously, between Arthur Brown and Bruce Wayne, it’s pretty much a tossup.

Damian was screwed from go. Just like her.

She’s still staring at his profile, still trying to figure out what to say or if she should even open her mouth when Morgan wanders by and leans against their table.

“Hey girlfriend,” she says to Steph, shooting a glance at Damian. The malachite streamers in her ears dance as she turns her grin back Steph’s way. “Little young for you, isn’t he?”

Slowly, Steph looks across at Damian, who’s glowering at both of them.

And she totally shouldn’t, she knows that. But some things are inevitable. Inexorable.

Written in the stars.

She waits for Damian to look straight at her then gives him her sweetest, most evil smile. “He’s my ex’s little brother,” she tells Morgan, and watches World War III happen in Damian’s eyes. “I still get along with Tim,” she adds, “so I look after the kid for him sometimes.”

A little truth and a lot of bullshit. She knew how to lie before she met Batman and company, but it didn’t take her long to realize she was a piker compared to the master and his obedient minions. They taught her almost everything she knows. She knew they had to be good for something.

Damian, on the other hand, is about as far from good as it gets. He looks like he’s about to implode. His nostrils are flared so wide she can practically see all the way to his brain.

This is the best moment of my life, Steph thinks. It’s all downhill from here.

“Chicken breast and sprouts on flat bread for me,” she tells Morgan. “Cornbread and pinto bean soup for my scowly friend, hot chocolate for both of us.”

“You got it,” Morgan says, and goes away laughing.

“You asked for that,” Steph says into his furious silence. “Do us both a favor and ease up. I want to be able to come back here.”

He stares back at her, probably planning how to dismember her and get away with it. She meets his glare with the closest thing she has to calm.

“Very well,” he says eventually, dropping his gaze.

He follows through, too. Doesn’t even look at her until Morgan comes back with their order and the tab, and after that she’s too busy refueling to care. Chasing bad guys burns calories like crazy, and she missed lunch.

When she pushes her plate away and looks over at Damian, she’s kind of surprised to see he’s finished his soup. “Wasn’t so bad after all, huh?”

He shrugs. “I’ve eaten worse. Digesting it is something else.”

Sometimes, she can’t believe this kid. He never lets up. Folding her arms to match his, she leans back in her chair and says, “You’re not making any friends with that attitude. And before you say you don’t need any, allow me to clue you in. If you want to keep the uniform? You really kind of do.”

His upper lip curls. “The voice of experience?”

“If you want to take it that way, sure. Gotham’s got a lot of how-not-to-be-a-superhero stories.” She meets his eyes. “Most of them are dead.”

“Some of them should have stayed dead.”

She huffs a laugh. “I’m going to pretend you’re talking about R the second. Because if I think about the alternative, I may have to kill you.”

He makes a derisive noise. “You know nothing about killing. None of you. Even my father…” His voice trails off and he’s glaring at her again. “I’ve proven myself over and over, and my thanks is a place on a threat list and a plan to neutralize me.”

“Don’t give me that ‘poor little me, I had to learn how not to kill’ crap,” she snaps. “We all have to pay our dues, and if having Red on your ass is the least of yours, consider yourself lucky.”

“Why should I care what you think?” he snaps back. “You’re one of the how-not-to stories, _Fatgirl_.”

He’s dead. Completely, absolutely, never-coming-back-from-it dead. She’s going to murder him right here, right now. Or she would if a sudden round of applause from the booth off to the left didn’t distract both of them.

Startled, Steph looks up into a ring of grinning faces.

“Dudes, that was _awesome_ ,” says a guy with dreadlocks and glasses. “You like, totally made us believe you were them.”

“Yeah, totally,” says the girl standing next to him. She has no hair and so many piercings, Steph can’t count them all.

Steph has a brief moment in which to wonder what Prudence is doing with herself before the girl continues, “Do you guys RP with a specific C&C group? Because we just lost our B-girl and our Robin isn’t half as good as the kid.”

“C&C?” Steph repeats blankly.

“Cape and Cowl,” says the guy. He unzips his backpack and digs around through what looks like layers of tech. Finally, he drags out a rumpled flyer; it’s metallic silver printing on black paper with tiny grey bats all over it.

Damian’s sour look just gets sourer, but if he wasn’t, you know, _him_ , she’d say that was horror in his eyes.

“Aw, gee, guys,” she says hurriedly before Damian can open his mouth. “Thanks, really, but we’re kind of a private party.” She grins sickly. “Invitation only, you know? Our B’s kind of, um… stuck up?”

She puts it out there as a really stupid joke, hoping without much hope to get out of this without turning the situation into a total FUBAR. To her surprise, the whole crew nods.

“Dudes who go in for playing the big guy usually are,” pierced girl says sagely. Steph sucks her hysterical laughter down and keeps smiling; she’s probably giving Joker a run for his money in the grin department.

“Well,” she says. “It was… nice meeting you guys?”

There’s a general consensus of “Yeahs”, a few “Awesomes” and some uncertain milling. Pierced girl’s Gooseberry trills. She raises a hand to Steph as she pulls it out and walks away, answering a text. The rest of the group wanders after her.

Steph and Damian watch them go.

“Wow,” Steph says. Damian doesn’t reply, but she knows him well enough to be able to feel the waves of WTF coming off of him.

“I am going to go cause extreme hurt to miscreants now,” he says. “You may join me, if you must.”

“What about letting your food settle?”

“If the road kill this place serves doesn’t digest, I will aim for their faces or weapon hands,” Damian tells her as he stands up.

“Projectile vomiting as crime deterrent. Nice,” Steph says, more than a little grossed out. On the other hand, getting puked on isn’t fatal. Probably.

Damian is standing, backpack over his shoulder, his impatience making him look more rabid than normal. “I’m leaving.”

“Don’t get your green panties in a knot, I’m coming.” She’s dropping a twenty on top of the tab when her comm crackles to life.

“Batgirl,” says Proxy. “You busy?”

Steph grins at Damian; he frowns back, arms crossed. “Come on, brat wonder, we’re back on the clock,” she says under her breath, and the frown morphs into a fierce grin. He’s right behind her when she pushes through the door into the cold, crisp night. “What have you got for me?” she says to Proxy, her breath billowing out in clouds that don’t do anything to hide the bright yellow signal in the sky.

There are deserted rooftops everywhere. Their suits are in their backpacks. She follows Damian down the nearest alley and up a fire escape while Proxy outlines a hostage situation and some crazy armed with ketchup and horseradish.

“He’s calling himself Son of Condiment King,” Proxy explains, laughter rippling around the edges of her voice.

Steph snorts. “B saves these guys for me, I swear,” she says. Proxy starts laughing just as Damian sets the EMP. “Gotta go,” Steph says. “I’ll check in when we get there.” She pulls the comm out of her ear before the pulse goes off.

“Your chimney,” she tells Damian, pointing. “My chimney.” She points the other way. “You peek, you die.”

“Why would I want to?” he sneers as he marches off.

“You walked right into that one, Brown,” she tells herself, and starts pulling the parts of her suit she doesn’t have on under her clothes out of her bag.

According to the chrono built into the wrist of her gauntlet, it takes them a little over a minute to get changed, hide their stuff, and meet back up in the center of the roof.

“You up to speed?” she asks, fastening her utility belt. When there’s no answer she looks up.

Damian is staring stonily at her. She sighs.

“I know, dumb question.” She finishes with the belt, pulls her grapple out and points it at a gargoyle on a building across the street. “Okay, let’s go hot cross Condiment Dude’s buns.”

“And I thought Grayson was bad,” Damian says as he shoots his line.

“I’m just picking up your slack,” she tells him when they’re on the next roof.

“What are you talking about?”

She finishes coiling her line while she runs. “You’re Robin. Robin’s supposed to make bad puns.”

“Puns are the lowest form of humor. Satire is superior,” he says, and jumps.

“Oh for…” She has to wait until the next roof to say, “Fine. According to the experts we sound like the real thing, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“What real thing?”

“Batgirl and Robin.”

“Robin and Batgirl.”

It surprises her enough that she lowers her grapple and blinks at him. “What?”

His mouth looks like it’s going to be a smirk any second now. “My name has a longer history. It should go first.”

Her mouth feels like it wants to drop open. “You’re not serious.”

Totally a smirk.

“You’re serious.” She tries to pinch the bridge of her nose through her cowl and fails. “Oh my god, you are a dork.”

“It’s called seniority,” he says smugly. “Deal with it.”

“This conversation is not happening,” she says, and shoots her line before she strangles him with it.

Forty-five minutes later, covered in ketchup and horseradish, she hands off a sniffling child to a grateful mother then stares blankly into the mic being waved under her nose.

“Batgirl,” the reporter (male, mid-thirties, made of teeth) gushes. “Since your return to our fair city, there have been quite a few team-ups for you and the boy wonder, an unprecedented turn of events in recent years. Is Batman and Robin a thing of the past? May we consider Robin and Batgirl Gotham’s new power couple?”

Oh, he did not say that.

“Tt.”

He so did.

“Ssshh,” Steph says, raising a finger to her lips. “I’m having a moment.” She glances down at Damian. He’s all crossed arms and mustard and, of course, the smirk. “Not a word,” she tells him, “if you want to live to see puberty.”

“You don’t need my help to make a fool of yourself,” he says. He leaves before she can maim him.

Steph escapes the teeth and makes for the cave. She needs about a thousand showers and it’s not like she can go home covered in horseradish.

Also, just for the record, trying to get dried ketchup out of your hair? Sucks a lot and takes forever. The sky’s getting pink around the edges when she crawls through her window. She stuffs her backpack in the closet, crawls under her blankets without changing clothes and passes out.

When she wakes up her mom’s already gone. Steph figures she must have gotten called in early because the thermostat’s still set at fifty-eight. There’s no coffee made and no paper on the table.

Steph turns the heat up a little and wanders into the kitchen, grabbing a jug of oj from the fridge and flipping the switch on the silver monster that started life as a corporate gift for Bruce Wayne as she goes. The smell of Alfred’s favorite roast begins to fill the room and her caffeine-starved bloodstream.

Yawning, tugging her hair out of her face with the help of a scrunchie, she goes to get the paper. It’s sitting in its usual neat roll on the stained doormat, courtesy of Aisha in D-6’s kid. Steph bends to pick it up, shaking it open as she does.

A collage of eggplant, yellow and robin red smacks her in the face. **Batgirl & Robin, together again!** screams the headline.

Below **New Condiment King Foiled** , a smaller caption announces: Batgirl Has a Moment.

Clutching the paper against her stomach, Steph starts laughing. She laughs so hard she has to sit down on her icky doormat.

Mona from B-10 gives her a weird look as she goes past. Creepy Ernie from two floors up puts his hand on her shoulder and asks if there’s anything he can do for her. Anything at all.

“Yeah, stop touching me,” she says, brushing both him and his hand off. Using the doorknob, she hauls herself up, still holding the paper. She’s not letting go of it until she’s good and ready. Not until she’s cut the articles out, circled the headline in neon pink, drawn aubergine hearts and shiny silver bats all over the picture and sent the whole mess to Damian.

From Batgirl to Robin.

Lots of love.


End file.
